In the conclusion of our coverage of the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 launch, we made the statement of dare we say a $300 graphics card represents an excellent value, from a price point perspective? These cards are definitely going to put significant price pressure on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 200 series. At the time, the GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 were selling for upwards of $650 and $400 respectively, and ATI's newly released Radeon, which performed somewhat better than the GeForce GTX 260 card , was introduced at only $299. Of course, NVIDIA quickly responded with a hefty round of pricing cuts that brought their GeForce GTX 280's price down considerably. - HotHardware

EVGA e-GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Graphics Review

Today NVIDIA is introducing an updated GeForce GTX 260 version with more stream processors and texture filtering units than its predecessor. The name of the new GPU is the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216, due to the GPU's allotment of 216 stream processors up from 192 in the first generation GeForce GTX 260. We've got a couple of the new GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 cards in-house from EVGA and Zotac, and plan to show you what they're made of. Not much has changed, NVIDIA's specs for the two cards are virtually identical, with the only real differences coming in the form of an increased number of stream processors.

NVIDIA achieved this feat, not by designing a totally new GPU, but by enabling one more functional block in the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216's existing GT200 chipset. The GT200 has a total of 10 banks of 24 stream processing units, for a maximum of 240 steam processors as implemented in the GeForce GTX 280. We should note that although the new Core 216 card doesn't have the same GPU configuration, NVIDIA has informed us that the new cards can still be linked with first generation GeForce GTX 260 cards and operate in SLI mode. That is probably one of the main reasons for keeping the GeForce GTX 260 name.

Save for its Core 216 branded decal on the fan shroud, EVGA's new GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 SuperClocked edition looks essentially identical to the first-gen GeForce GTX 260. They have the same cooler, PCB, and same dual link DVI outputs. The GPU on this card however is clocked at 626MHz, with a 1350MHz shader clock, and 896MB of 2106MHz effective memory. The increased number of stream processors in conjunction with the card's higher clock speeds should give it a nice performance boost over the original GeForce GTX 260. EVGA also includes a copy of their Precision overclocking utility.

It seems NVIDIA has done just what they intended to do with the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216. By upping the number of stream processors and texture filtering units in the GPU, they were able to increase the card's performance enough to give it a slight advantage over the Radeon HD 4870. We should reiterate that we tested a couple of factory overclocked cards, however, which give them a performance boost as well, so reference clocked GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 cards will not have as large of an advantage as we reported. We've given you a look at the performance, which is obviously what you should be concerned with.

Reference GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 cards carry an price tag of $279, which puts them somewhere in between 512MB and 1GB version Radeon HD 4870 cards in terms of price. The first-gen GeForce GTX 260 cards are already selling for about $235 on up, so don't expect their prices to drop too much on today's news. Overclocked cards like the ones we have tested here will be somewhat more expensive, however with pricing witin the $299-329 range. Cards should be available in retail channels immediately. So it is a very interesting time in the GPU space, with some extra competition from NVIDIA put into the market.

ATI owns the single card leadership position with the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and has a killer value priced product in the Radeon HD 4850, while NVIDIA holds the single GPU leadership position with the GeForce GTX 280 and now surpasses the Radeon HD 4870 in the performance segment with the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216. NVIDIA also has the added benefit of supporting PhysX and CUDA, while ATI has support for DirectX 10.1. And it is a great time to be in the market for a new graphics card, no matter what your budget and the new GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 underscores that nicely.